The Spectrum community is arguably more on top of the machine’s history than any other in the world of gaming, so it’s always quite noteworthy when something and/or someone escapes its notice entirely. And so it is with Lukasz Kur.
The screenshot above is of a game called a_e Adventure, or sometimes a_e in King Chrum’s Gold Mines. (According to Kur the character’s name represents “a portion of a forum member’s user name which inadvertantly looked like an emoticon of sorts – a little face with asymetrical eyes.”)
A fun, inventive 12-screen platformer with puzzle elements, it came out in 2014 and was apparently a spiritual successor to a Polish-language text adventure for the C64 and Nintendo DS from a few years earlier by the same author.
That’s already quite weird, but we’re just getting started.
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investigative journalism, public service, videogames, weirdness
My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of under £200 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).
But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.
It’s basically become magic.
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awesomeness, culture salvage, piracy, public service, videogames
Wordplay! Because not only is this article a token attempt at having a post on WoSland for the first time since nineteen-banana, it's about putting something on the empty shelves of the infinitely annoying Newsstand app in iOS.
I've been delving around the App Store newsagents, and after a world of pain found a bunch of totally free publications (no time-limited trials or any of that guff) that aren't completely awful, and will stop you having to look at that ugly, undeleteable, unhideable icon. You can see them in the pic above. Links/descriptions below.
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free stuff, iPad, media, public service
Hi, Minter lovers! As you’ll know, Jeff tends to be… well, let’s say “a little prickly” about constructive criticism, and especially the sort that comes from me. So could one of you perhaps be the best friend that tells you when you need to use more deodorant, and point out to him in the nicest possible way that he can’t do controls?
Jeff’s history of often staggeringly fantastic games is regularly blighted by a consistent propensity for terrible, terrible ideas about how to control them. Who could forget, for example, the genius insight that what Defender really needed was mouse control and no Hyperspace? Messed-up controls were the one ugly, hairy wart on the face of iOS Minotron, and now he’s done it again with the ludicrous decision to FORCE players to hold their iPhone diagonally to play his latest release, Caverns Of Minos.
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iOS, public service, stupidity, videogames
There are two groups of videogamers in the UK (and perhaps the world) whose Venn diagram has a surprisingly small intersection. In Group A we have "People who own a Nintendo DS", and in Group B there's "People interested in buying a Nintendo 3DS".
In fairness, this may be because Group B is so small it'd be a tiny intersection even if it was entirely contained within Group B, but that's neither here nor there. In any event, because WoSland loves Nintendo so much, we're going to try to help increase it a bit.
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nintendo, public service, videogames
